4: Initialization
and cleanup

As the computer revolution progresses, “unsafe” programming has become one of the major culprits that makes programming expensive.

Two of these safety issues are initialization and cleanup. Many C bugs occur when the programmer forgets to initialize a variable. This is especially true with libraries when users don’t know how to initialize a library component, or even that they must. Cleanup is a special problem because it’s easy to forget about an element when you’re done with it, since it no longer concerns you. Thus, the resources used by that element are retained and you can easily end up running out of resources (most notably memory).

C++ introduced the concept of a constructor, a special method automatically called when an object is created. Java also adopted the constructor, and in addition has a garbage collector that automatically releases memory resources when they’re no longer being used. This chapter examines the issues of initialization and cleanup and their support in Java.

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